To whom it may concern, I'm an instructor in the Mathematics Dept. at MIT, and over the past year we've been collecting video footage of dolphins and other marine mammals tailwalking. We have gathered considerable data for dolphins between 2 and 3 meters in length, and have found that larger mammals such as false killer whales cannot maintain the bulk of their bodies out of water. In an attempt to extend the range of our data, we seek video footage of tailwalking or tail standing by marine mammals that are approximately 1.5 meters long or less (the shorter the better). If you have video footage of marine mammals longer than 3 m that can tail-walk, we would love to see that too. Prof. John Bush, Prof. Frank Fish, and I are collaborators on this study. Our hypothesis is that the ability to tail-walk depends mainly on the length of the animal, and that there is some intermediate length range over which a mammal can perform this behavior. We wish to assess the extent of this length range of marine mammals that can tail-walk. Thanks in advance for your help. Matt _______________________________________________________________ Dr. Matthew J. Hancock Instructor in Applied Mathematics Department of Mathematics, Room 2-339 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA web.mit.edu/~hancock/www/ | hancock@mit.edu | (617) 253-1715